Your site needs conversions. After all, the website is intended to promote your business and your products.
If customers are not purchasing products and services from you, the website is not doing its job.
So, you build a website, and you pour your own knowledge into the process, crafting a site that you believe will foster a good level of conversion.
But this is not enough.
Putting a plate in front of a hungry child is not enough. The fork needs to turn into an aeroplane, or an animated confirmation about the quality of the food is required.
While your own knowledge is extensive, you still need concrete understanding and insight, and this can only be gained from using the right tools. This is where CRO, or conversion rate optimisation, tools make such a big difference to your business.
Why is conversion rate optimisation so important?
Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) is important for one simple reason: you can never have too many conversions. Think about your relationship with your customers as an ongoing process of improvement and development. At the beginning of your journey, perhaps you had very little attention from leads in your field. However, over time, this attention grew, and you had to look for new ways to optimise the process, energise your customers, and grow your revenue.
It’s also worth remembering that conversions don’t come for free. You still need to invest time, money, and effort in bringing your audience to your page and turning this audience into paying customers. With conversion rate optimisation, you are not only increasing your conversions but also reducing the cost of each one.
How do conversion rate optimisation tools work?
CRO tools give you the resources you need to optimise conversion. On a fundamental level, this is based upon data and understanding. The tool will enable you to gather, store, manage, and interpret data, and then use this data to streamline your users’ route to conversion.
To increase your conversion rates, you need to know your customers and their motivations. You need to know how these customers are engaging with your marketing initiatives, how they are accessing your website, and what experience they are having when they get there. With this information, you can tailor your promotional activities towards specific customer segments, expand the reach of your outbound marketing, and improve the structure and design of the site to achieve more conversions.
All of this makes the entire process far more effective and cost-efficient. Removing guesswork from your marketing reduces costs, while more streamlined routes to conversion increase your revenue.
What to look for when choosing a CRO tool
There are a few different elements to bear in mind when it comes to choosing a CRO tool.
Ease of use
In order to future-proof your optimisation strategy, you need a solution that is going to be easy for your teams to use. This reduces the time you have to spend on training. It also lessens your reliance on individual members of staff. If you have staff members who are the sole experts in a particular solution, this puts you in a difficult position if they are not available. As such, a more universally usable solution is the better option.
Full functionality
While you certainly need a CRO tool that is within your budget, this cannot come at the expense of key pieces of functionality. Look for these features when you choose a solution:
- Data analytics software to give you crucial user data insight
- User behaviour tracking capabilities so you know what your users are doing on your website
- A/B testing features to help you decide on the best elements for your page
- Speed testing features to help you optimise page performance
- Landing page builders that give users a positive experience when they first access your site
In this sense, a CRO solution may not just be about a single tool, but rather a broader toolkit. There are so many different aspects that go into conversion rate optimisation, as well as specific details that need to be taken care of, that you may need to deploy various solutions side by side to achieve comprehensive results.
Data integration
Make sure that you can easily use the data you are gathering via your CRO tools. This means, the tools themselves need to integrate with your other software solutions so you can take the appropriate actions as you improve conversion rate.
Manual data transfer between solutions can be difficult and time-consuming. It also puts you at risk of losing key pieces of data during the transfer. Integrated solutions are far more effective and easier for your teams to use.
3 tools you can use for conversion rate optimisation
Amplitude
Amplitude is an events tracking analytics tool that examines precisely what users are doing on your websites. These events include the playing of videos, scrolling through text, expanding minimised elements, clicking on calls to action, or other user activity. The idea is to provide businesses with a clear picture of user behaviour.
Amplitude advantages
- Easy to use after some training, even at scale
- Automatic data visualisation at a high quality
Amplitude disadvantages
- Limited functionality on the free version
- May be difficult for teams to use at first, but it has a positive learning curve
Pingdom
Pingdom is a popular tool that provides crucial insight for business owners. Via an intuitive and user-friendly interface, you will be able keep track of page loading speeds and track how users are responding to your website. The tool is geared towards accelerating the loading speed of your site – something that is very important to CRO.
Pingdom advantages
- Highly effective analysis of page speed
- Precise monitoring on a round-the-clock basis
Pingdom disadvantages
- Some users report difficulties with bulk editing of values.
- Other users report that managing different user accounts is tricky.
SimilarWeb
SimilarWeb provides detailed insight into competitor websites, giving your own business a benchmark against which to measure progress. You can gain insight into their traffic sources, the keywords they are ranking for, and user behaviour, as well as data regarding bounce rate and page views.
SimilarWeb advantages
- A comprehensive range of different analysis types
- Easy and intuitive to use
SimilarWeb disadvantages
- On current versions, only desktop traffic is analysed.
- Analysis is based on estimation and is not guaranteed.
Choosing the right conversion rate optimisation tool
Different organisations have different objectives in mind when it comes to increasing conversions. Some will already have a stream of one-off customers, and they want to turn these customers into repeat purchasers. Others may be seeking to gain more subscribers, converting customers with long-term premium support packages. Businesses nearer the beginning of their journey may simply be trying to convince more of their visitors to make a purchase.
Choosing the right CRO tool means understanding your own KPIs and business goals. This will help you recognise your specific approach to conversion optimisation – the first step towards getting the best from CRO.
To learn more, reach out to our team.
