Conversion Rate Optimisation- How to Boost Your Results

• Remarkable Research on What Really Works in Online Marketing

  

  What's really stopping your results from flowing?

  Adobe has just released a report that shows very clearly what works in online marketing. Rather tellingly, 86% of online marketers aren’t doing it.

  The Adobe 2013 Digital Marketing Optimization Survey presents compelling evidence of what marketers and online businesses need to do in order to succeed.

  Incredibly, and rather damningly it also reveals that most of them aren’t doing what’s needed and have no plans to do so.

  Learn more... read more...
  May 09, 2013

• Why Conversion Rate Optimisation Doesn’t Work

  

  Is poor strategy and faulty equipment hindering your conversion rates?

  Conversion rate optimisation won’t work for most online businesses; at least not straight away and there’s a very obvious reason for that.

  You’ve left it too late.

  There’s an old saying in horticulture: The best time to plant a fruit tree was 10 years ago, the second best time is right now.

  And so it is with conversion rate optimisation. The sites that are doing it really well have been doing it for a very long time.

  Consider a site like Amazon, started in the early 1990’s and has been testing and optimising ever since. All through the nineties, into the noughties and now we’re well into the noughty teens.

  That’s actually three consecutive decades of online testing and optimisation improvement (and some of you thought online business was a relatively new phenomena.)

  Time to catch up... read more...
  Apr 23, 2013

• Speed Traps – Remove the Social Buttons and Improve Conversions

  

  Are all your social media buttons stalling your site performance?

  Social media sharing buttons are one of the biggest drags on any website’s performance, so removing them altogether may significantly increase your business.

  Many sensible online marketers know that speed (fast loading web pages) has a direct correlation to conversion rates and revenue. Even Google penalizes slow loading sites in the search rankings.

  Yet whenever you start looking at what’s slowing down your site, inevitably it’s all those third party plugins and scripts, especially the social media sharing scripts that are the biggest offenders.

  So should you just do away with them altogether?

  For the answer, read on...

  read more...
  Apr 12, 2013

• How to Increase Sales Online

  - Get more bookings, signups, registrations etc

  Shopatron recently released an infographic that perfectly highlights the four key areas that all online business owners should be concentrating on to increase sales.

  It encapsulates what I and many conversion rate optimisation consultants have been saying for years:

  • Be Fast
  • Be Simple
  • Be Friendly
  • And Be Trustworthy

  Learn more on how to increase your online results here...
  read more...
  Feb 19, 2013

• How to Increase Form Completion

  

  If you really want to get more leads, newsletter signups, bookings etc from your online forms, then here’s a baker’s dozen of tips to increase your results.

  Some of the old school marketers among you will have a hard time accepting the recommendations, but if you want more leads then read on.

  read more...
  Feb 15, 2013

• How to Speed Up Your Site

  Speeding up your site is one of the simplest ways to improve your online business and conversion rates.

  Research by Microsoft, Google, Amazon and many others has consistently proved that slow loading web sites and web pages (ie: takes more than two seconds to load) costs billions of dollars in lost revenue. 1 Second Delay Costs $1.68 Billion a Year

  Discover 16 things you can do right now to improve you site performance today.

  read more...
  Nov 27, 2012

• Blink and You’ll Lose a Customer

  

  Users are even less tolerant of slow pages than just a few years ago.

  In less time than it takes to blink you will lose a potential online customer online.

  New research from Google, Microsoft and retailing king Walmart show how slow loading sites and pages can cost online retailers dearly.

  The results of the research published in The New York Times shows that online shoppers will only wait about 250 milliseconds before abandoning a page, purchase, site or video.

  That’s actually a lot less than the blink of an eye.

  Time is Money

  Read on...

  read more...
  Jul 03, 2012

• Great Products = High Conversion Rates

  Everything Else is Online Marketing Mythology

  

  Landing page optimisation may not be all that it seems. For all that’s written about conversion rate optimisation and how to improve it, very little is written online about the part the actual product or service plays in the process.

  Not surprisingly the type and quality of your product or service has a huge impact on your online conversion rates. 

  This was brought home to me recently when one of my clients launched a new product range that saw conversion rates go through the roof.

  Across all online marketing channels conversion rates doubled and even tripled because of the new products.

  Even Adwords, which is always the runt of the online marketing litter, had sales conversion rates up around 5%.

  Email and organic search conversion rates were up to around 20%.

  Read more...

  read more...
  Mar 20, 2012

• Conversion Rates Report 2011 - Nothing's Changed

  Econsultancy has just released its Conversion Rate Optimisation Report for 2011, and sadly the rates are still stuck around 2% to 3%. The same as they’ve been for the past decade and more.

  So Econsultancy asks the question: “...why are conversion rates not better than they are?” and it suggests it’s “...because conversion rate optimization is complex.”

  I disagree.

  While conversion rate optimisation undoubtedly takes work and discipline, it’s not like we don’t know what to do.

  Leading Conversion Rate Optimisation consultants such as Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg, Tim Ash, Steve Krug and others have been proclaiming the techniques and benefits of conversion rate optimisation since the 1990’s.

  Yet marketers and businesses still do almost nothing about it.

  Why? Read on...

  read more...
  Oct 27, 2011

• 55% of Shoppers Abandon Poor Performing Sites

  Conversion Rate Optimisation Tip #9 - Make Sure Your Site Works

  That is, make sure everything works on your website, for everyone, all the time in all circumstances

  You will lose more than 50% of your sales and leads if you don't.

  This has been said many times before, and the research over the past 10 years always backs it up.

  This latest study on Online Retail Usability from Econsultancy really puts some stark numbers on what poorly working sites can cost you.

  Among the findings:

  

  Read more findings...

  read more...
  Jul 12, 2011

• Slow Sites Will Kill Your Sales

  Speed Up Your Site to Get More Business

  There's one very simple reason why anyone in online business should have a fast loading site:

  You'll lose lots of business if you don't.

  Slow loading sites will cost you sales and leads.

  Research has always proved that customers want fast loading sites and will do more business with sites that load quickly.

  Even Google has started penalizing slow loading sites in their search results.

  Recently I came across some even more compelling research that showed how much revenue the big boys lose for every fraction of a second their site's slow down.

  Click here to find out more...

  read more...
  Jun 22, 2011

• Why Food Pics Increase Your Conversion Rates

  Conversion Rate Optimisation Tip # 7

  Foodtography is the latest craze sweeping the internet. Millions of people are sharing photographs of their food, often for no other reason than they just feel like it.

  According to stock photography site Crestock, there are dedicated blogs and websites springing up daily.

  So what has all this got to do with increasing your conversion rate?

  Simple, pictures of food are one of the quickest ways to boost your conversion rate or engagement rate, even if your site has nothing to do with food.

  And if it’s sexy food, even better.

  Why Sexy Food Works

  Learn Why...

  read more...
  Jun 18, 2011

• Online Conversion Rate Calculator

  Try our online Conversion Rate Calculator to see how much extra business you can gain just by using smarter marketing techniques.

  Are you at 2% like almost everyone else, or closer to 40% like the very best?

  Try it and see.

  read more...
  Sep 18, 2010

• What is a Conversion Rate and Does it Really Matter?

  While we should all be just a little obsessive about increasing our conversion rates, the problem is everybody measures them differently.

  Your Conversion Rate is simply the business results your site achieved (EG: Sales, registrations, names gathered etc) divided by the number of visitors to your site.

  But do you use Visits, Unique Visits or even something else as the basis of your conversion rate calculation?

  Even the Experts Can't Agree

  read more...
  Aug 07, 2010

• Kiss and Sell - Conversion Rate Optimization - Tip # 4

  

  The simpler you can make your online processes the better.

  The easier it is for your customers to interact with your site

  the more money you’ll make,
  the more leads you’ll get,
  the more conversions you’ll get etc.

  Just think of Google.

  Late to the search engine game, it made searching so simple it eventually trumped all the long established players. (Some of you don’t even know who the players were before Google.)

  Not only did Google become the premier search engine, it went on to become one of the dominant technology companies, even putting the wind up Microsoft.google

  Simplicity is a very powerful marketing tool. Don’t under estimate it.

  Remember the KISS principle – Keep it Simple Stupid.

  read more...
  Jul 02, 2010

• Confessions of Conversion Rate Commando

  There’s more to it than just conversion rate.

  For the past 12 years I have been a conversion rate fanatic, evangelist and downright pain to some people over conversion rates.

  While my obsession has not been without good reason, for a while now I’ve been thinking that conversion rate is perhaps not the ultimate measure of a site’s performance that I thought it was.

  The Problem With Averages

  The first problem with comparing yourself to global average conversion rates is that they are averages.

  Without seeing the bell curve it’s hard to gain any context of where the low or high performers are.

  read more...
  Apr 07, 2010

• What Italian Ice Cream Can Teach You About High Conversion

  Conversion Rate Optimization - Tip # 3

  

  Uncle Benny was famous in Western Australia for introducing irresistible Italian ice cream to the locals.

  In the early days he used to make his delicious concoctions at home before taking them down to the port city to sell on the street corner from a frozen tin.

  
  

  According to Benny: “If at the end of the day, I had an empty tin and a pocketful of change, then I knew it was a good flavour. If the tin was still nearly full and my pockets empty then not so much. That was my market research.”
  

  read more...
  Mar 16, 2010

• Conversion Rate Optimization - Tip # 2

  Tell the truth, damn it!

  
   photo credit: Chester Zoo

  Tiger Wood’s lame apology was universally panned for being phoney.

  Hey, even us guys could tell he was just blowing smoke up our collective fairways.  Not to mention some of his die hard fans who felt queasy about the whole thing.

  So, if nearly everybody could see through this heavily choreographed charade, what does that have to do with increasing your website conversion rate? 

  read more...
  Mar 10, 2010

• Conversion Rate Optimization - Tip # 1

  

  Make Your Images Bigger

  Welcome to a new and ongoing series of tips on how to improve your online conversion rates.

  Every week (roughly) I'll be giving you one technique that you can use straightaway to improve your online results.

  Tip number one is to make your images bigger, your thumbnails, your normal images and even your expanded images.

  Images of less than 100 pixels square are pretty much ignored according to recent research.

  
  

  Size Matters

  read more...
  Mar 01, 2010

• 80% Conversion Rate!! I'd Like To See That

  Seth Berman over at Post Click Marketing recently posted on how some large companies such as Mattel are getting an 80% conversion rate for some of their website properties.

  Unfortunately he didn't say too much more, so I immediately chastised him for being such a tease and begged him to do an interview, share some slides or whitepaper with the companies in question.

  He promised to do that, so stay tuned.

  What Seth did add was that Mattel wasn't the only one getting such high conversion rates. He cited Mozilla and this page as another example.

  This is the Firefox 4 download page See pics below.

  My first reaction was: “Well, yeh, of course, that's what you'd expect from such a page.”

  But after engaging my marketing and optimisation brain, I realised there was plenty we could all learn from Mozilla's page.

  So here are my seven top tips of what you can learn from the Mozilla Firefox page:

  read more...

  read more...
  Feb 24, 2010

• Conversion Rate Optimisation Tip # 6 – Don’t Use CAPTCHA Codes

  CAPTCHA codes are one of my pet online peeves. Those indecipherable words and symbols that you’re usually asked to read before you can register, leave a comment or otherwise engage with a website.

  Recently I came across a piece of research that proved why I am so right to loathe these things.

  http://www.seomoz.org/blog/captchas-affect-on-conversion-rates

  The report stated that these cryptic conundrums reduce conversion rates by over 3%.

  So say your site is turning over $1 million per year, you could be losing $30,000 a year just by using CAPTCHA codes. Ouch!

  read more...
  Feb 22, 2010

• Conversion Rates - The Missing Improvement Secrets

  Conversion rates can be 400% higher or more when running a marketing campaign. This means there is more to website conversion rate improvement than conventional conversion rate practices such as landing page optimisation, and tweaking website design factors.

  Offline and offsite marketing factors such as better advertising, better offers, better products etc are equally as effective.

  The fact that marketing/ advertising campaigns can increase conversion rates by four or even eight fold seems obvious in hindsight. It’s really just marketing 101: If you’re marketing is any good it should be driving more highly qualified customers to your website who are more likely to convert at a higher rate. (If that isn’t happening then review your marketing and your landing pages.)

  But the effect of good marketing brings up a number of key points that aren’t usually part of the current conversion rate improvement conversation.

  read more...
  Dec 16, 2009

• Online Marketers Pay Lip Service to Conversion Rate Optimization

  
  photo credit: kimberlyfaye

  More than 90 percent of all online marketers and businesses are leaving vast amounts of money and business on the table by ignoring conversion rate optimisation.

  A recent survey by Alterian found that less than half of the marketers they surveyed use any sort of analytics.

  Of those that do, many find it hard to interpret the data, and less than 10% regard analytics as a vital tool in improving their business results.

  Alarming as the results are, they are not surprising. Optimising conversion rates and using analytics go hand in hand.

  read more...
  Mar 06, 2009

• 101 Tips to Improve Your Conversion Rates

  
  photo credit: saguayo

  I could have easily come up with a 1001 tips, but that might have been too much to digest in one sitting.

  As I say on my main site, most online businesses are suffering from"The Death of a Thousand Cuts".

  With conversion rates till stuck at around 2.0 percent, for the vast majority of online businesses, there is still plenty of work to do.

  So, in no particular order here are are the first 101 tips to boost your online results:

  read more...
  Mar 05, 2009

• How Validation Will Increase Your Conversions and Profits

  In This Story: Validate for Profit Why Standards Matter Avoid Legal Action Obey The Law Build Trust

  To put it simply - validating your site (making it standards compliant) will increase your conversions, sales and profits.

  It will also prevent you from getting sued.

  If ever anyone ever tells you that your site's validation and compliance doesn't matter be afraid, very afraid. This is a warning bell that says they don't understand the requirements and responsibilities of business.

  read more...
  Feb 19, 2009

• Do You Have a 30% Conversion Rate? Why Not?

  The Popcorn Factory does. Or at 29.5% it's close enough. Recent figures from Nielsen Net Ratings continue to show that a handful of sites are way ahead of the rest of the ecommerce world in terms of conversion rates.
  The Popcorn Factory - 29.50%
  L.L. Bean - 23.60%
  Abebooks - 20.60%
  Amazon - 17.60%
  Hollister Co - 17.60%
  Lands End - 17.20%
  Coldwater Creek - 17.10%
  Gymboree - 16.00%

  Some of these sites such as Land's End, LL Bean, QVC have consistently been among the leaders for a long time. What's interesting is that they were all leaders in the field of direct catalogue marketing long before they went online.

  Obviously they know something about how to sell, and how to transfer that expertise to the online world. Yes Virginia, the old rules still apply.

  What's more these results are now starting to get close to the bricks and mortar average of 50%, so it shows that great sales results can be achieved online

  How Does The Popcorn Factory Do It?

  read more...
  Jan 30, 2008