The best analytics to track for conversion rate optimisation
If you’ve been struggling to see results from your search engine optimisation (SEO), PPC, social media or other digital marketing efforts, you may need to explore conversion rate optimisation (CRO).
The CRO process involves many factors, including website performance, user experience, content, and design. You’ll need support from your entire marketing team or a specialised conversion rate optimisation agency. However, investing in CRO can have great payoffs—higher revenue among them.
What is conversion rate optimisation?
Conversion rate optimisation is the practice of making changes to your website and conducting tests with the intent to increase conversions.
A “conversion” can refer to many actions. E-commerce companies often refer to sales as “conversions.” In other B2B industries, a “conversion” may be another desired action, such as:
- Signing up for a newsletter
- Creating an account
- Downloading a whitepaper
- Signing up for a software trial
- Watching a video
- Requesting a demo
- Providing a phone number or email address
- Revisiting a saved shopping cart
Defining conversions is only one part of the CRO equation. To optimise conversion rates, you’ll need to track and measure related metrics.
How to track and quantify CRO metrics
Before starting your CRO efforts, you’ll need to calculate your current website conversion rate. Here’s how to do it:
- Divide the total number of conversions by the total number of visitors to your site
- Multiply that number by 100
The resulting number is the total percentage of website visitors that convert. Ideally, a good conversion rate is 10 per cent and up. If you find your conversion rate to be much lower, though, don’t panic. Real-world conversion rates are often much lower — many B2B companies see a rate of less than 3%!
The goal is, ultimately, to improve your conversion rate and attract more business than your competitors. To do this, you’ll need to:
- Select a CRO tool
- Identify the conversions you plan to optimise
- Set up goals and reports
- Make strategic website changes
- Run A/B tests and multivariate tests based on this data
- Continue to track and repeat until you see improvements
Tracking doesn’t stop at calculating conversion rates, either. There are a number of metrics that can help you optimise for more conversions.
The best metrics to track for CRO
Before you can dive into CRO strategy development, you’ll need to begin utilising analytics tools. If you aren’t using one already, we recommend using Google Analytics. It’s free to use, well regarded across nearly all industries, and very useful for conversion rate optimisation tracking.
In addition to the core Google Analytics goals you should set up when using the platform, the following goals can provide further insight around CRO. You can use these metrics when optimising conversions on individual landing pages or for website sales funnels.
1. Conversion by device
This metric allows you to see if your conversion rate is higher on desktop or mobile. You can even see if conversions are higher on Android phones vs. iPhones, or Windows desktops vs. Apple computers.
If you see that conversions are lower on one type of device, it may mean one of two things:
- Most of your target audience prefers one device over another
- Your site or content does not perform well on certain devices
For example, if we noticed that 60% of our conversions happened on iPhones and only 40% on desktops, we could first check to make sure that our site is optimised for mobile usage. If we confirm that it is, then we can begin to hypothesise that our audience is made of heavy iPhone users. Now we can explore further ways to optimise for mobile, and specifically iOS, usage.
You can pull a similar report to view conversions by browser. However, it’s important to remember that some browsers are simply more popular than others—nearly two-thirds of all internet traffic comes from Chrome browsers.
2. Conversion by source
If you maintain a mix of optimised landing pages, social media accounts, and PPC ads, it can also be useful to track conversions by source.
It may also be helpful to track conversions by source. If you’re seeing low conversion rates from a specific source, check out your target audience’s activity. Is this a platform they tend to spend a lot of time on? If so, you may need to tweak your marketing efforts or landing pages. If not, then it can be best to focus your efforts elsewhere. Spending time and money to promote your brand through the wrong channels won’t help your conversion rate!
3. Website traffic and visitors per page
Before assuming your conversion goal simply isn’t of interest to your audience, check to see where the majority of your website visitors go. If you’re putting an offer or download on a low-traffic page, your conversion rates will likely be low as a result. By centralising your conversion events around higher-traffic pages, you can bring your rate up.
4. Website search
If your website has a search function, take a look at what visitors search for. This can give you two great insights for CRO:
- Are people searching for something that you don’t cover in much detail or provide on your site? If so, this is an opportunity to explore to optimise conversions.
- Are people having trouble finding a particular page in your site nav? (You may need to pair this research with a look at your bounce rate metrics.) If so, can you bring this content to the forefront so visitors are able to find it and convert on the page?
5. Site and page speed
Your website’s performance can also impact B2B conversion rates. If your landing pages are slow to load or deliver a poor user experience, it may be driving down conversions. Test page speeds on desktop and mobile to ensure you’re giving users on all devices the chance to browse your site and convert.
6. Scrolls and clicks on pages
It’s entirely possible that you have a great offer people want to convert on, but they simply aren’t seeing it. By using a heatmap tool, you see where users are scrolling, lingering, and clicking. If your CTA or value proposition is placed at the bottom of a page, and site visitors drop off at the midpoint, it’s time to rearrange your content.
7. Bounce rate and time on site
If you utilise pop-up CTAs for your conversion event, take a look at your bounce rate and time on site metrics.
- Bounce rate refers to the number of website visitors who arrive on and exit from the same landing page, without clicking around your site.
- Time on site indicates how long a visitor spends browsing your content.
If you find that users are exiting your site before your CTA is timed to pop up, then you may want to try adjusting the order of operations. If you can show an offer before a visitor exits, you have a chance to increase your conversion rate.
Improving conversion rates
All of the metrics listed above will help you decide how to proceed with CRO. Depending on what you discover, you may decide to:
- Change your homepage layout
- Set up a new website conversion funnel
- Add more social proof and testimonials
- Change the design or placement of a CTA
- Adjust your use of pop-ups and banners
- Creating downloadable case studies
- Improving usability and accessibility
This is only a tiny sliver of what you can do to optimise conversions. The ideal solution is entirely unique for every website based on its audience, traffic, content, and more.
Developing a CRO strategy
Patience is key when creating and implementing a conversion rate optimisation strategy. It can take more than a year to see a marked improvement in your conversion rates—and that’s if you do everything right. When developing a conversion rate optimisation strategy on your own, you may find that you need to make repeat predictions and run multiple tests before you find the right course of action.
To speed up the conversion rate optimisation process and ensure you’re tracking all the right metrics, you’ll want to consider working with a conversion optimisation agency. It’s important to pick an agency that understands your company, as well, since successful CRO tactics differ between industries and audiences. A B2B SaaS company will require a different CRO strategy than a B2C fashion retailer or a D2C supplement brand.
The team at 93x is fully focused on B2B SaaS clients. We work closely with leading and growing software-as-a-service companies, helping them maximise conversions and improve revenue.
If you’re looking for a specialist conversion rate optimisation agency for your B2B tech agency, check out our services here.