Use conversion optimisation to close the loop. (Image via Flickr, by Jorge under CC).

 

What is Conversion Optimisation?

Every website has at least one goal. This goal, commonly called a “conversion” , is the most desired action for the visitors that come to the site. In fact, you could say the purpose of a website is to help the visitor reach that goal and convert.

Types of conversions vary: from a credit card transaction, submitting an online form or downloading a file to simply accessing a certain page.

One of the major benefits of Online Marketing is the ability to accurately measure the number of conversions on a site, along with other metrics like number of visitors – which then allows you to work out the conversion rate. Beyond simply measuring these things it's also possible to use the information from your tracking programs and feed it back into the system. You can then test, improve and optimise the process of getting a user to convert. This is what we call Conversion Optimisation.

Why is Conversion Optimisation important?

Conversion Optimisation helps you make the most of the traffic that comes to your site. This can be done in 2 main ways:

1. Use your data to determine which types of traffic bring in the most conversions – and then focus on bringing in more of that traffic.
2. Use testing to determine how to change your site in order to get more conversions from on-site traffic.

In order to test and improve both your traffic-driving tactics and your site, you need to gather as much information as possible. There are hundreds of tools available, ranging from very basic and free to very complicated and expensive. For the purpose of this post I will be covering some of the popular, easy to use and FREE (or pretty damn cheap) tools available. These are ideal for the beginner to intermediate conversion optimiser.

What Conversion Optimisation Tools Should You Use?

Google have, over the years, introduced several tools that can holistically track your Online Marketing data. The major advantages of the Google products are that they are free, simple and integrate well.

Google AdWords Conversion Optimizer
Google’s Conversion Optimizer is a tool within Google’s PPC advertising platform AdWords. It allows you to manage your campaigns by cost per acquisition (CPA) rather than by traditional cost per click (CPC) or cost per impression (CPM). You choose the CPA that you are willing to pay, and Google uses software to edit your bidding price and advert position in order to meet your specified CPA. While most PPC fundis (myself included) will argue that software can never replace a skilled campaign manager, this tool is very helpful if you do not have the time or experience to optimise your campaign (for some tips on how to use Conversion Optimizer, click here). This tool can only be used if you are advertising with AdWords and have implemented AdWords conversion tracking on your site.

Google Analytics
If there is one tool that you should be using, this is it. Google Analytics is free, easy to implement and simple to use. It’s basically a web tracking program that allows you to see where your site traffic is coming from and how it is behaving on your site. You can set up goals to work out conversion rates on different types of traffic, and also allocate value to goals to work out a CPA. As it is easily integrated with all other Google products like Google Check Out, Analytics will definitely help you to close the loop on your online marketing efforts.

Google Website Optimizer
Just as its name suggests, this tool allows you to optimise your website by split testing different versions of pages. You can, for example, set up 2 different versions of your homepage and Website Optimizer will randomly split your traffic between these pages before calculating which page delivers the best results. You can experiment with both A/B split testing or the more complicated multivariate testing. This tool is available to anyone using Google Adwords or Google Analytics.

Crazy Egg
Crazy egg is the only non-Google product on this list and also the only one to have a monthly fee. However, at only $ 9/month for their basic package, Crazy Egg is well worth the money. In a nut (or egg) shell, this product allows you to see how traffic behaves on your site by showing you where traffic clicks. This is easily illustrated on a heat map (or more detailed confetti map), which shows an infra-red type image of the clicking activity on any page on your site. Crazy Egg will make it easy for you to see if you have placed page elements where visitors expect them to be, and you can keep testing until you get the page layout that results in the least confusion and frustration for your visitor.

Give these a try and let me know what you think.