At the onset of your ecommerce journey you need to establish your site goals. A conversion is when a user completes a desired action on your site. So you can’t calculate your conversion rate until you have establish your site goals.
Obvious site goals include all those en route to a sale, like ‘add to cart’ and ‘check out.’ But a site goal doesn’t always have to be about sales. ‘Subscribe’ can be a site goal too, as can ‘contact us,’ ‘Leave a review,’ or even ‘Download now.’
FYI: You can determine what a business’s site goals are by seeing what ‘Call to action’ (CTA) pops out at you as a visitor. Warning: Once you take note of these you’ll see them everywhere!
Let’s assume you have your site goals set up, you have established your current conversion rate, and now you are looking to optimize your conversion rate...
Now, did you plan ahead and set up the tracking for all the right metrics to help you make data driven decisions? If your answer is no, consider taking a step back to take two forward. Without reliable data, you can’t truly begin your CRO journey.
If you do have all your tracking in place, the next point of call is to let your store run long enough to gather sufficient quantitative data. The more the merrier, but at least 6 weeks to 3 months of data collection is recommended if you wish to draw real insights from traffic and user behavior.
TRACKING TOOLS: Some tracking tools you will come across in your conversion optimization endeavors include Google Analytics, and heat mapping tools such as CrazyEgg or HotJar.
Drawing insights for Conversion Optimization
Proper analysis of sufficient and reliable data, combined with a front end audit, can reveal an assortment of insights, which are essentially opportunities for your online store. Data is just data until it’s an insight – then it’s gold.
Golden nuggets of insight can reveal upselling, cross selling, and repeat purchasing opportunities. They can reveal QUICK fixes in your user experience that will make a BIG difference too. You might identify potential usability flaws and customer friction points. There might be a number of pain points you could reduce for yourself too.
Once you have your insights, it can be overwhelming to decide what to do next. You might have identified header, main navigation, and footer improvements you can make. There could be site load speed issues. Perhaps some of the copy isn’t grabbing attention or it’s leaving your visitors lost and confused. Maybe your calls to action need to stand out more.
The trick here is not to spin out. Look for the stuff you can afford to do NOW that will make a difference now. Establish what you can afford to put on the backburner. Whatever you do here, don’t succumb to ‘analysis paralysis.’ Chip away at changes rather than putting them all off until tomorrow.
Once you have decided on any changes you want to make to your site you’ll want to run some tests. You want to know which changes make the best difference. Split tests (AKA: A/B tests) are good for this. It’s basically presenting one version to half your audience and another to the other half, then seeing which option performs better.
You can see why CRO is an endeavor more suited to established online stores with sufficient traffic and sales. Firstly, if you are dealing with data from 100 site visitors and you run a split test, the results could be fairly random. But when you start looking at thousands of visitors, the data starts becoming more reliable. Plus there are costs involved in the process. So you want to be doing sufficient trade to warrant the spend.
TESTING TIP: Don’t change too many things all at once or it will be hard to test which change influenced what.
UX is now closely intertwined with SEO. Google recognizes a good user experience. If your visitors regularly bounce, Google will penalize you by moving you down the rankings on the search engine results pages (SERPS). Conversely, if your user experience is good, they will reward you.
Site speed, for example, is an important factor in UX. Image files that are too big could cause a page to load too slowly and frustrated users will bounce. It’s a BIG problem, yet a simple fix. Remember, website’s can slow down over time too. So a periodic clean-up is recommended to keep your site optimized and retain the frictionless UX you have worked so hard to create.
The following is a checklist ShopCreatify has developed over time, and they’re not afraid to share it. It’s not the be all and end all, but it is ALL stuff you should consider in order to boost conversions. If some of them are Spanglish to you, don’t worry. There's more detail on each point here.
If you have an established Shopify store with a baseline of performance and you suspect it requires a conversion boost but you would rather leave it to the Shopify Experts to help you…
ShopCreatify has a specialized ecommerce conversion rate optimization service just for you, and it’s aptly named ConversionBoost.
ConversionBoost is a structured working relationship between ShopCreatify and Shopify merchants, with the stated purpose of improving their online store’s sales and performance.
Want to see how ConversionBoost could work for you? Here’s a conversion boosting case study of a store called Lunafide. Go check it out!
If you’re interested in ConversionBoost or have any other hopes and dreams for your Shopify store…
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