For any ecommerce website or online marketing team, you will know how vital conversions are to your business. With the competitive landscape of online shopping in 2024, it is even more important to understand how to improve conversion rate optimisation (CRO) on your website. If you’re looking for ways to enhance conversion rate optimisation on your Shopify store, look no further. In this article we explain all things CRO and provide some brilliant examples of how you can put it to practice and maximise your sales! We also discuss the positive impact of implementing CRO tactics in ecommerce and the importance of conversion rate in SEO.
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What Is Conversion Rate Optimisation or CRO?
Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) is the practice of increasing the percentage of users who perform a desired action on a website. This action could be anything from clicking ‘Add To Cart’, making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, filling out a form, or any other goal relevant to the business. This process is used to improve a website or landing page’s performance by focusing on the customer experience.
With the advent of online shopping, social commerce and digital advertising, the shopping experience can take many paths before a purchase is made. From seeing an ad on Google that directs a visitor to your site, before leaving without purchasing, then coming back later after being retargeted, before reading some reviews online, then finally buying from you a week later, there are myriad paths a consumer can take on the journey to becoming your customer.
With this in mind, it’s more important than ever that you do everything you can to predict customer behaviour and guide them on the right path. This is where CRO comes in. It’s all about removing friction, encouraging actions, creating a superb customer experience and ultimately, moving your website visitors to a point where they will buy from you - and keep coming back.
Conversion Rate Definition
The conversion rate is the total of conversions divided by the number of visitors your website has received. This data gives you a unique insight into the behaviour of your users and the growth of your online sales.
What Is A Good Ecommerce Conversion Rate?
Conversion rate represents the percentage of your website traffic that ‘converts’ - by which we mean completing a defined goal, such as buying a product.
Ecommerce websites often produce a sales conversion rate of between 1% and 3%. The objective of CRO is to increase your rate of conversion from the traffic you already have. If this can be increased to 2% or even 3%, you’ve effectively doubled or tripled your customer numbers without having to bring in new traffic to your website.
By having a good conversion rate, you’ll be able to get to know your customers better and make more informed decisions about how you optimise your Shopify website. So you can improve your page design elements to meet the needs of your audience.
Why Is Conversion Rate Optimisation Important?
Implementing CRO into your ecommerce strategy is essential in growing your revenue and driving new conversions. CRO also allows your business to get more value from the visitors and users you already have. Furthermore, conversion rate optimisation is a great way to enhance your Shopify store’s SEO and increase your organic search performance.
- Lower customer acquisition costs
- Increase revenue per visitor
- Grow your customer base
- Improves user experience
- Improves customer journey
- Maximise ROI
- Competitive advantage
What Are The Benefits of CRO?
1. Drive More Sales
CRO gives you more control over how your customers interact with your Shopify website and the routes they follow toward conversion. It can help get more of your traffic to where you want them to be on your site, and make it easier for them to make a purchase
2. Makes Better Use of Current Traffic
One of the biggest benefits is that it works with existing traffic that is already flowing into your Shopify store. CRO isn’t about driving more traffic from external sources, but making the most of the visitors already coming to your store and turning them into buying customers. Once you have optimised your site, a page or a flow, you really start to capitalise on the traffic your Shopify store is already receiving through organic and paid marketing efforts.
3. Improved Profit Margin
Even a relatively modest improvement in conversion rate can lead to a sizable increase in profit. This is because you’re simply improving on an organic process that results in more sales, without any cost implications such as advertising.
4. Keeps You Customer-Focused
Understanding your customers is key: what they want, and how to sell it to them. CRO can help in both of these areas and keep you focused on your customer base.
Data gathered from user insights, feedback, surveys and testing can help you understand how customers use your Shopify store and where they encounter stumbling blocks that get in the way of a sale.
5. Can Positively Impact SEO
The objective of optimising your Shopify site is to keep your visitors browsing, and ultimately for them to make a purchase before leaving. In the eyes of Google, this behaviour is preferable to a flow of visitors entering then quickly leaving your site. It indicates that your store is delivering what visitors are looking for, which is algorithmically positive and can lead to Google serving your site in the SERPs (search engine results pages) more often, and higher up, for relevant queries.
6. A better website
Ultimately, the process of CRO results in a better Shopify website which evolves based on better decision-making. It’s better for you, as it will be driving more revenue, and better for your customers, as they will enjoy a superb user experience that makes it easy for them to buy from you, again and again.
Importance of Conversion Rate Optimisation for SEO
There are many reasons why pairing CRO with SEO is one of the best strategies for growing your Shopify website. Firstly, integrating your CRO with SEO is an effective way of reducing your site’s bounce rate and increasing the level of potential customers. CRO helps you to understand your users’ expectations and deliver the tools they need in order to convert. So you can transform your potential customers into actual buyers.
CRO also helps to ensure that your users take action when visiting your Shopify website as this behaviour has a significant influence on your rankings. Google takes into account the level of interaction users have on your website and how positive their experience is. So it isn’t just good for building your profit but also pushes you higher up in the search engines.
- Lower bounce rate
- Grow your potential customers
- Increase your organic traffic
- Improve your search rankings
- Leverages your profit
- Move ahead of your competition
- Best Conversion Rate Optimisation Practices
Common CRO Techniques
There are a whole variety of conversion rate optimisation practices but we thought we’d highlight some of the most impactful methods so you can apply them to your website.
1. Optimise Your Landing Page Design
It is vital that your landing page design makes the customer journey as seamless as possible. Making sure your most important content is prominently displayed will help with boosting conversions. It is also important to arrange your content strategically and focus on making each element visually appealing so that users are kept engaged.
For example, placing your ‘Add to cart’ button right next to the product description will be convenient for users to click through. You should also make the most of white space and to complement it with bold and bright colours with your elements as this makes it easy for users to navigate. Remember to provide multiple large images of high-resolution to highlight a product’s best features and to create more trust with your users.
2. Tailor Your Website Content To User Behaviour
High-quality, engaging website content is a fundamental part in converting users as you are able to emphasise persuasiveness and influence potential leads to take action. Your website content should be informative, educational and interesting to your audience so that they feel encouraged to stay. However, don't add too much information on every page. Just ensure each page leads to a clear next step.
Here are some useful ways you can improve your Shopify website content and convert more visitors.
- Use more headlines to attract your users’ attention
- Bold fonts and colours
- Ask questions, break up content, be direct and use numbers in titles
- Clear and concise content formatting
- Writing style needs to use the right tone, voice and phrases
3. Optimise Call-to-actions (CTA)
A clear and bold call-to-action is essential for converting customers into buyers. It is a great way of directing visitors to take action and generating new leads. This could be requesting visitors to ‘sign up to a new webinar’, ‘subscribe to a latest newsletter’ or ‘make a purchase’.
All of these actions are incredibly valuable for driving more conversions, improving user experience and building positive connections. Take a look at some of the top tips for making your call-to-action stand out from the rest.
- Bold and direct headline
- Bright button
- Position it higher on the page
- Font must be visually appealing
4. Simplifying Contact Forms
When you use contact forms, you can learn the needs of your individual users which can make it easier to optimise your website for them. In your form, you should only include the most important fields so that it is kept short and concise for a user to submit.
Do not overcomplicate your form as this can lead to users leaving. Focus on creating a simple and easy form that offers a basic design and has consistent styling. You should also order it by having the priority fields at the top followed by the least priority ones, as this delivers better user experience.
To streamline the password creation process, it is beneficial to let users submit their forms by logging into their Facebook or Google account so that it can be done in one click.
5. Improving Website Speed
The faster your page loads, the higher your conversion rate will be. That’s why it is vital that your Shopify website delivers users with the information they need as quickly as possible. Not only does this build a better impression of your brand but also reduces bounce rate. Poor website speed has a negative impact on a variety of website elements, from user experience, keyword rankings to overall site authority and credibility. What’s more, a study by Kissmetrics’ analytics found that 40% of consumers will abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load.
For a good website speed, it needs to load within 2-3 seconds, especially if it is an ecommerce site. If it is longer than this, users will abandon your site and go somewhere else, leading to a loss in conversions and overall site traffic.
To boost your website speed, we’ve listed some helpful methods:
- Compress and optimise your image files
- Remove any unused apps or plugins
- Avoid using multiple images on a slider
- Reduce redirects
- Minimise unnecessary coding
We highly suggest that you check your website speed here using Google's PageSpeed Insights tool and practice applying some of our top improvement techniques.
6. Social Proof
Social proof in Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) refers to the psychological phenomenon where people look to the actions and opinions of others to determine their own behavior, especially in situations where they are uncertain. Use reviews, testimonials, case studies, social media mentions/shares, influencer endorsement, certifications and press coverage to build trust and credibility with your brand.
7. Mobile Optimisation
Ensure your website is fully functional and user-friendly on mobile devices. With the increasing use of smartphones and tablets, mobile optimization has become crucial for conversion rate optimization (CRO). If a website isn't mobile-friendly, visitors are likely to abandon it, leading to lower conversion rates. The main elements of CRO for mobile include a mobile responsive design, fast loading times, a simplified navigation, simplified contact forms and mobile-friendly CTAs such as clickable telephone numbers and email addresses.
8. Research Your Target Audience
Researching your target audience is a crucial step in Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). Understanding who your audience is, what they need, and how they behave on your website allows you to tailor your content, design, and functionality to better meet their needs, ultimately leading to higher conversion rates.
How To Identify Areas That Need CRO
Understand how users interact with your site, identify any obstacles that prevent conversions, and make data-driven changes to enhance the user experience and drive more conversions. Firstly, you should consider focusing on the pages that receive the greatest amount of traffic or have the higher number of conversions as you will likely notice results faster. Secondly, it is important to start CRO on the highest value pages or pages that are underperforming compared to the rest of your content. You can also identify areas of a page that are most (or least) engaging with heatmaps to see where there is opportunity for CRO improvement.
How To Work Out Your Conversion Rate
It’s easy to work out your conversion rate - simply divide the total number of conversions, by the total number of visitors. For example:
100 conversions 2,000 website visitors
100 ÷ 2,000 = 5% conversion rate
When you are aware of and track your website's conversion rate, you can measure its growth and what impact it will have on your business when it changes. You can set clear forecasts and goals and utilise CRO amends to increase sales, basket value, repeat business, and profits.
What Conversion Metrics Should You Consider?
There are lots of ways to evaluate what success looks like on your Shopify site. The best way is to be specific about what metrics you track and how you measure them. Here are some examples of conversion metrics to evaluate on your ecommerce store.
Leads
This could refer to submissions of your onsite enquiry form, a livechat dialogue, an email, phone call, registration to an event, or download of content.
Sales Numbers (Revenue)
Track number of products, value of baskets, source, channel, campaign and new vs returning customers.
Clickthrough Rate
This lets you see out of everyone who saw your content, how many clicked through. It helps you understand how your CTAs, copy and designs are performing. This works well in conjunction with A/B testing.
Cost Per Acquisition
This lets you understand how much it costs you to acquire a new customer. Ideally, you want your CPA to be lower than the revenue spent by that new customer in order to remain profitable!
Conversion Rate
As mentioned earlier, simply divide the total number of conversions, by your total number of visitors.
Understanding Conversion Metrics & Goals
Different industries have varying objectives and business models, which influence their specific conversion goals. Here's an overview of common conversion goals across various industries:
Ecommerce: Product purchases, Add to cart, Email sign-ups and Product reviews
Media & Publishing: Subscription Sign-Ups, Account Creations, Ad Clicks & Views, Social Shares, Email Sign Ups, Content Engagement
Travel:Booking reservations, Tour sign ups, Package purchases
Healthcare: Appointment bookings, Contact form submissions, Service sign ups
Education:Course enrollments, Lead form submissions, Webinar registrations
How To Improve Conversion Rates
The best approach to conversion rate optimisation allows for continuous evolution towards your goals. Our Growth, Optimisation and CRO specialists have developed a robust process that incorporates the following steps for incremental success:
1. ‘What do you want to achieve?’
This is the first question we ask all our clients - it allows us to understand their business goals and how we will work towards them.
2. Analyse
Using a number of techniques and tools at their disposal, our optimisation Shopify experts will create a comprehensive audit, gathering data and identifying areas of friction on the website which are suppressing sales.
3. Prioritise
The recommendations from the audit are prioritised in a roadmap of activity, based on what we expect to have the greatest impact on the bottom line.
4. Test
We launch our roadmap and implement the changes to your Shopify site, measuring against hypotheses and monitoring the impact the amendments have on conversions.
5. Learn
By constantly analysing and reviewing the changes we make, we’re able to understand the impact they’re having and tweak or amend in order to maximise the value from them.
6. Iterate
CRO is not a one-off exercise - every brand’s audience, and ecommerce itself, are constantly evolving, and there are always ways to enhance performance by reviewing and tweaking a Shopify store.
Key Components Of CRO and Tools for Shopify
A/B Testing
A/B or split testing is a process in which versions of a variable (such as onpage elements like imagery, a CTA, a headline or copy) are shown to two different segments of your site visitors at the same time to determine which has the most impact. The data from these experiments enables better decisions to be made about changes to your website by demonstrating the best way to solve onsite issues or optimise a particular element for better results.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
You should monitor key performance metrics that help track the success of CRO efforts, such as bounce rate, time on page, click-through rates, and, most importantly, conversion rate.
Conversion Funnel Tracking
Google Analytics is a free tool that allows you to gather invaluable information about visitors to your Shopify site and their behaviour. You can create funnels that show the path that visitors take on your website to reach a conversion, from the first interaction to the final action. For example, how far along the conversion path customers get and where the main drop-off points are. This enables you to review and improve those parts of the journey.
Shopify Site Speed Improvements
It’s well known that slow website speeds have huge impacts on ecommerce results. It can impact the customer journey so you lose sales. We have tips on how to understand website speed and also how you can take steps to optimise your Shopify site for speed.
CRO work can help avoid lost sales from slow loading pages or broken customer journeys.
Persona Research
This enables you to gain greater insights into exactly who your customers are. By speaking directly to them, you can design your Shopify site and its content around this, and make decisions based on demographics, values, lifestyle and behaviour to help increase your conversion rate.
User Research, Surveys and Feedback
Surveying your visitors can provide insight into what is working, and where there is opportunity for improvement. There might be a difficult part of the user journey that you haven’t considered or perhaps your visitors have a question about your service or product that your website doesn’t answer?
Surveys are important to gather feedback from real visitors and learn about how your business and product are viewed externally. Use tools like heat maps and user behaviour stats to inform your decisions to make site improvements.
CRO vs UX
Conversion rate optimisation and user experience work in tandem, as they both help a website to work more effectively in its goals.
The key difference is that user experience is how a person feels when they use the website. It focuses on a deeper understanding of what users need and value, their abilities and limitations when using your site. Take into consideration the holistic experience of a visitor on your website, encompassing design, usability, and the ease with which they can complete desired actions.
CRO, as we’ve discussed, is more focused on the processes to increase the percentage of people on the site who become customers.
CRO can tell you what is happening on your Shopify store, while UX gives deeper insights into why it is happening. CRO may confirm that page variant A performs better than page variant B, but UX lets you understand why page A performs better.
How To Track Your Conversion Rate Optimisation
When focusing on conversion rate optimisation, it is also important to invest in conversion tracking to see what works and what doesn’t. This will give you the knowledge about what website practices deliver more conversions.
To summarise, conversion tracking refers to monitoring your conversions and consumer actions which help your company move closer to achieving your preset goal. If you create an event which you’d like your consumer to complete, each time your consumer buys an item, adds something to their cart, opens an email or clicks on a link, it will total these as a conversion. The higher this total, the more it indicates how well your marketing efforts are performing.
GA4 Conversion Rate Tracking
You can monitor this by setting up conversion tracking to your website’s Google Analytics account. On Google Analytics 4 (GA4) the process is slightly different to the previous version as you will need to make a new report in Google Data Studio which will need to be connected with your GA4 data source. You can create conversion tracking for already tracked events and custom events. Our GA4 guide article covers the steps in detail for you to follow.
Session Duration and Bounce Rate
Both session duration and bounce rate are key indicators to how effectively your conversion rate optimisation is working so it is essential that you track them. The session duration measures how long a user spends on your Shopify site during a visit. If your page has a high session duration, the better your website will be at driving conversions.
On the other hand, this also helps to reduce bounce rate which focuses on the amount of single-page visits. This is because the longer a user spends on a landing page, the more likely they are to navigate to other pages on your website and progress through the sales funnel. Helping to grow your conversions so you can maximise your ROI.
What Does A Conversion Rate Optimisation Specialist Do?
As Shopify experts, we are proud to have the best in-house Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Specialists. Their focus is on improving the percentage of website visitors who complete a desired action by analyzing user behavior, conducting experiments, and implementing changes that enhance the overall user experience and increase conversions.
CRO-nclusion - Boost Your Shopify CRO
Apologies for that terrible pun. The benefits of CRO are clear - with iterative changes to your Shopify store, performance can be improved and more sales can be generated from the traffic that you’re already getting. So what now? If you’re interested in learning more about how our Optimisation and Growth Specialists can help you improve your store, generate more sales and create brand evangelists, simply get in touch and they’ll be happy to have a chat.
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