While many marketers and business leaders focus on tactics that drive traffic to their websites, investing in Google Ads,  email marketing, social media, and content marketing, it’s crucial not to overlook the importance of actually analyzing and improving the efficiency of these particular tactics.

 There is little question that learning how to increase your conversion rate is one of the best and most underrated ways to grow your business. Whether you’re selling physical products, digital downloads, or services, the success of your company depends on two things: how many people you reach and how many you convert to buying what you offer or at least take a closer look at what you offer. 

Good conversion rates will vary depending on the industry and type of business, but typically a conversion rate of 2-3% is considered good. To calculate your website’s conversion rate, divide the total number of conversions by the total number of visitors.

Even if you achieve the “average conversion rate” among most companies (2.5% -3 %), there’s always room for improvement. Simple strategies like gathering the right data, optimizing user experiences, and even using the right CTAs can make all the difference.

In this article, we will examine the various factors that impact your website's conversion rate, as well as common mistakes that are made in terms of marketing efforts that cause your tactics to not be as effective as they ought to be.  With that in mind, consider this article to be your practical guide to conversion rate optimization in 2024.

The Benefits When Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Is Part of the Growth Marketing Framework

The benefits of CRO are vast.  Not only will your website be more attractive to visitors, but it will also have higher conversion rates. In addition, CRO can help you increase customer loyalty, target potential customers more effectively, and ultimately maximize revenue.

By effectively utilizing CRO tactics, businesses can create a better customer experience and optimize their overall website performance. Ultimately, this will lead to increased conversion rates and higher ROI on digital marketing efforts.

Where to Maximize Conversion Rate Optimization As Part of Your Growth Marketing Process?

Once you have accepted and identified the fact that conversion rate optimization is pivotal for your business, you need to begin to identify which areas of your website should be targeted with these tactics.  Below are a few you ought to key in on first.

Homepage

The homepage is often the first page a visitor will see and therefore it is important to optimize this page to increase conversions. Make sure that your content, visuals, and calls-to-action are all optimized towards ensuring that your visitors take the appropriate action (ex; lead, sale, form fill, etc.).

Landing Pages

Landing pages should be optimized for specific goals of each sales team such as downloading a whitepaper or signing up for a newsletter. Be sure to include relevant visuals, content, and CTAs on the page to maximize and increase conversions.

Product Pages

Product pages should be optimized with images, videos, customer reviews, descriptions, and more. These elements can help browsers get the information they need to make an informed decision.

Checkout Pages

The checkout page should be optimized with simple navigation and a one-click purchase option. Additionally, it’s important to include trust signals such as customer reviews and secure payment logos.

Pricing Page

The pricing page should be optimized to make sure that customers can easily find the information they need to make a purchase decision. Additionally, having different pricing options can help capture more sales and increase conversion rates.

Blog

Blog posts can be optimized to increase conversions by including relevant calls to action at the end of each post. Additionally, leveraging content upgrades can help capture all your incoming leads and drive more conversions.

8 Common Conversion Rate Optimization Mistakes That Go Against Proper Growth Marketing Fundamentals

Now that we have established the importance of conversion rate optimization for growth-focused businesses, let us now delve into what sort of pitfalls you need to avoid when implementing conversion rate optimization.

1. Testing without a roadmap

In our experience, many conversion rate optimization efforts fall short because of bad timing. For example, tests being run during the holiday seasons are likely to yield unreliable results for your SaaS business, as your target audience is vacationing. This might lead to sinking website performance instead of improving it. 

While doing your preliminary research, it is essential to set up stages for your experiments such as creating tests, QAing, launching the test, waiting for the results, etc. A CRO roadmap enables you to track the timelines and progress of your experiment at every stage, which can promise reliable results. 

Therefore, it is highly recommended to create a roadmap for conversion rate testing for at least a quarter to ensure that there is sufficient data to conclude these tests 

2. Disorganized one-off testing

A/B testing is a part of CRO. However, we’ve noticed many marketers directly jumping into testing without analyzing their site’s current performance, or backing up their tests with research or factually-based hypotheses that justify the need for such tests. 

Conversion rate optimization performs better when a testing roadmap so that testing is done methodically and as per a prioritization framework. Moreover, it is imperative to create benchmarks for KPIs from current website performance. 

3. Testing with inadequate sample size

Businesses starting with conversion rate optimization often make the mistake of running A/B tests on pages with low traffic. The problem lies in th fact that testing with low traffic does not fetch you reliable results because the test does not have enough data to get a high confidence score.

Hence, you will either have to stop the test or wait for some time until it reaches its statistical significance. With low traffic, achieving statistical significance can take a very long time. 

Therefore as a best practice, you should run tests on pages with high traffic such as pricing and free shipping, and let them run tests until they achieve a statistically significant result.

4. Not having a clear understanding of what your KPIs should be

Clarity is the first thing you should seek before setting foot on any of the experiments or campaigns as a marketer. Without understanding the objective, KPIs, benchmarks, and milestones, and without having a proper roadmap in place, you would not be able to properly analyze the ongoing results of your conversion rate optimization efforts.

Here are some of the key KPIs that you can potentially focus on when analyzing your efforts at improving your conversion rate(s):

• Current Revenues

•  ROAS (Return On Ad Spend)

• Average Order Value (AOV) 

• Customer Loyalty/Retention Rates

• Lifetime Value (LTV) 

• Return on Investment (ROI)

5. Not tracking micro conversions

As alluded to earlier, your business’s KPIs may include tracking big macro conversions such as revenue, free trial signups, requests for a demo/quota, purchases, bookings, checkouts, etc. But do you keep track of micro conversions—the baby steps to reach the final goal? 

Micro conversions can entail form fills, element visibility, scroll depth, clicks on CTAs, etc., steps that play a pivotal role in determining your website performance and user experience. More importantly, they help to enable you to analyze customer behavior in their journey on your website. 

Let’s take the example of an eCommerce website. You can track the following micro conversions while setting up your overall conversion rate goals and funnels:

• Adding products to the cart: Cart abandonment is one of the major concerns for any eCommerce store. Overall, it tends to indicate visitors’ interest in your products.   More importantly, having this information is extremely useful for optimizing remarketing efforts. By tracking clicks on ‘Add to Cart’, you can filter shoppers who add products to their carts and abandon them thereafter and observe their behavior to optimize your cart abandonment rate. 

• Browsing product pages: While our focus as marketers tends to naturally be on conversions and other important end goals, we end up ignoring the tracking of important metrics like product page views. The reality though is that tracking product pages reveals an estimated percentage of visitors who are interested in exploring your product. This data point effectively demonstrates the extent of visitors’  intent to potentially become a customer of yours. The insights derived from tracking this can guide you in terms of generating and testing new ideas geared towards optimizing your page experience to reduce the percentage of visitors who landed on your page but did not convert.

• Browsing a high volume of pages: You may have site visitors who visit many pages on your website without converting. This shows that they are somewhat interested in your business but are unable to find what they are looking for, or perhaps they need to compare it with what they have seen on other websites. This potentially presents an opportunity to remarket to these customers with the idea of bringing them back to your website to perhaps get the additional information they need or to make a purchase or request a demo (and become a prospective lead).

• Creating an account: The number of visitors who create an account on your website is another micro-conversion to be tracked. Although creating an account does not indicate a higher-end conversion (such as a purchase), this data point presents a group with high intent to become customers

6. Viewing all traffic with the same lens

In highly energized testing environments, marketers often overlook the details of the traffic in reports, such as segmentation, and end up making decisions hastily. They take a cursory look at the report result and take the call to make the changes on the live website. They often ignore crucial details and this results in failed or inconclusive tests.

Instead of directly jumping to the result while studying a report, it’s imperative to compare the results of different segments (whether traffic segments, customer segments, geographic demographic or behavioral segments, or device segments) for deeper insights. Segmentation can fetch you specific trends and insights from a group of people having a distinct behavior that can drastically vary from other groups. Therefore, to get granular and more actionable insights, you must segment reports based on demographics, geography, and other dimensions. This habit, if developed, can be promising for the success of your CRO program.

7. Ignoring well-performing tests

Why fix something that isn’t broken?  A common and generally understandable motto.

Conversion rate optimization, however, is and should be oriented towards continuously improving your website and the pages within it, whether they are currently performing well or not. 

While it is understandable to prioritize working on low-performing pages, however, it is imperative to not ignore your high-performing pages altogether. Doing so may allow you to find a few ideas by paying close attention to your website’s analytics. 

8. Giving up after a failed test

What is a failed test? 

If the variation you created did not perform better than the original version, it is deemed a failed test. This is a conventional belief, which, while understandable, is a terrible way to operate in practice.  A “failed” test can be an excellent source of numerous insights and learnings and is a part of CRO practice. There are no failed tests – only winners and learning opportunities. 

Here are a few questions you should ask if the variation does not yield an uplift: 

• Was the hypothesis wrong? What was the expected result, and why was it unattainable?

• Why did the original version perform better?

• What did the test results teach you about your audience?

• Is there any segment where an uplift was observed? 

Constantly examining these things will help solidify the framework for improvement that conversion rate optimization seeks to instill.  As far as best practices for implementing conversion rate optimization, we will examine them next.

10 Conversion Rate Optimization Best Practices to Implement To Maximize Your Growth Marketing Strategy in 2024

1. Go In-Depth With Your Data

Optimizing any business strategy and achieving sustainable growth starts with data. Guessing what your customers want and which product pages and conversion tools will work won’t get you the best results. Instead, you need to commit to constantly collecting useful insights. 

Start with the quantitative data you can get from sources such as Google Analytics. This could include data on traffic and traffic sources, details of user behavior on landing pages, and click-through rates for advertisements and marketing promotional campaigns. 

Remember, your quantitative data isn’t the only valuable resource you have. Qualitative data can help to give depth and context to the information you’re collecting. 

For instance, using on-site surveys or asking questions about how they found the purchasing experience on a post-purchase landing page can be extremely useful. You can even use social monitoring and listening tools to find out what customers are saying about your brand. 

Analyzing these insights can help you to know where to refine your overall customer experience to have the best chance to improve your overall conversion rates.

2. Examine Your Conversion Funnel

To best know how to go about improving your overall conversion rate it is imperative to know how and where you need to go about improving your conversion funnel. 

Examining your conversion funnel means analyzing the journey customers take to purchase your products or services. Google Analytics 4 for starters, can help to give you a behind-the-scenes look at what your prospects and customers are doing when they are on your website

Marketing analytics tools help to determine which pages your customers visit most often, how long they spend on each page, and which pages force them to hit the “back button” or leave your site. There are even heatmap tools such as Crazy Egg or Hotjar available that offer insight into the most viewed sections of your pages. 

The on-site analytics you collect will help you to define where you’re losing conversions most frequently. For instance, according to Big Commerce,  around 69.23% of shoppers abandon their carts before making a purchase. If your website is experiencing high levels of cart abandonment, implementing one-click checkout tools, more payment methods, or cart abandonment email tactics may be of value to your business. 

Moreover, Google Analytics can help you identify the journey that customers take in terms of making a purchase.  Understanding the multi-stage funnel can, for instance, help you to identify whether the message you are promoting at the remarketing stage is as effective as the copy you use in your Google search ads

3. Optimize Your Website Copy

It might sound obvious, but the copy on every page of your website should help to drive customers through the purchasing funnel. From the moment they arrive on your home page, your visitors should see a clear headline, drawing attention to the unique value proposition you have to offer.

Keep in mind however your unique value proposition shouldn’t just appear on your home page either. It should be consistently highlighted across all of your website pages, from your product pages to the “About” page and even your blog. When optimizing your website copy, there are a few points to remember:

• Consider SEO: Using keywords customers are actively searching for in your website copy makes it easier for visitors to find you. The more visitors you get to your website, the more chances you have of converting them. 

• Simplicity: Don’t overwhelm your visitors with too much information on the core pages of your website. Get straight to the point, and make it easy for your customers to understand what they need to do next on your website to access your solutions. 

• Be Benefit-oriented: While it’s tempting to list your features on your product pages or even your home page, the best copy focuses on the benefits your products or services will have for your customers.

4. Invest in a Better Website User Experience

UX and UI aren’t just popular terms in the web development landscape; they’re crucial concepts that every business owner should be aware of. According to UX Planet, for every $1 you spend on UX, you can expect a return of up to $100. 

While the steps you take to improve user experience on your site may vary depending on your business, there are a few things every company can do:

• Improve your website navigation: Make it easy for customers to find the information they’re looking for. Create a clear menu for your website, and stick it to the top of the page so it’s easy to access when users are scrolling. You can even add a search bar to your site if you want to help your customers search for specific things. 

• Optimize for mobile: According to Insider Intelligence, by 2026, mobile commerce will account for 8.7% of all retail sales. The easiest way to lose a sale is to make it difficult for consumers to access your pages on a mobile device. Ensure your website theme or design works well on any platform, that buttons and forms are easily accessible, and that copy is optimized for mobile platforms. 

• Speed up your site: Website conversion rates drop by around 4.42% with every additional second a page takes to load. If your site is loading slowly, you can speed it up with things like browser caching and image compression. You might also consider using a Content Delivery Network, if necessary. 

Most importantly, pay attention to any reviews or feedback your customers leave about website design issues. You can learn a lot about what to focus on in terms of your website optimization and ultimately, the most optimal conversion rate optimization tactics by doing this.. 

5. Optimize Landing Pages and CTAs

Landing pages can increase conversion rates significantly by removing the distractions that can cause customers to click away or abandon a purchase. If you’re trying to convince your leads to do something like signing up for a webinar or subscribing to an email newsletter, a landing page is a great idea. Additionally, campaign-specific landing pages can sometimes rank higher in the search results.

When you create your landing pages, make sure you follow the guidelines above for improving your website copy. Highlight the benefits of your solution “above the fold” (before customers need to scroll), and include a clear CTA. Your landing page CTAs and CTAs anywhere else on your website should always feature the following:

• Compelling action verbs like “activate” or “explore”

• Urgency, with words such as “Now” or “Today” 

• Contrast – to ensure buttons stand out from the page

6. Simplify Your  Forms and Checkout Process

Market analysts like Gartner say the best way to increase your conversion rates on forms, whether it’s a contact form or checkout page, is to keep it short and simple. With that in mind, you should always be looking for ways to make the path to conversion as streamlined as possible.

Every type of conversion requires a customer to do something. Usually, that means filling out a form either to contact your team, submit their contact details, or make a purchase. The longer and more complex the form is, the more likely it is your customer will give up.

When you’re building your checkout pages and forms, in terms of best practices you need to consider the following.

• Reduce form fields: Don’t ask for any information you don’t need. For instance, you don’t necessarily need a person’s date of birth included on a contact form.

• Automate where possible: Various tools allow customers to submit data to a form without typing anything. For instance, you can implement Amazon Pay options or contact form options into your site so customers don’t have to enter their payment or other personal details manually. 

• Explain form errors: Write clear error messages when something on your form isn’t filled out correctly, so customers don’t have to guess how to fix the problem.

7. A/B Test Everything

Finally, this suggestion isn’t exactly a new tactic for conversion rate optimization in 2024, but it’s something every business should be actively investing in. Ultimately, the factors that cause your customers to convert are likely to change over time. 

A/B testing or split testing involves testing two variants of a specific element on your site. This could be the copy on your product pages, the design of your checkout, or a CTA button. While testing the impact of every major part of your site takes time, it is worthwhile.

As consumer buyer habits change, you might implement new strategies into your roadmap, from offering consumers various ways to checkout to designing your website pages in different ways. The only way to figure out what’s working and what isn’t is to A/B test everything. 

It ensures you can figure out exactly what words, colors, and strategies convince your customers to make a purchase. The more you test, the more you’ll learn about your target audience and their preferences. This makes it easy to optimize your sales funnel. 

8. Upgrade Your Social Proof

Whether people like to admit it or not, our decisions are very often heavily influenced by what others around us to. That’s one of the reasons influencer marketing works so well. The online world is packed full of countless different companies, all trying to capture the audience’s attention. 

Social proof, in the form of testimonials, reviews, and badges, is excellent for conversion rate optimization because it shows customers they can trust your business.  Other types of social proof that can be influential in improving conversion rates include:

• Media or influencer mentions: Showcase whenever your company is mentioned by a public figure, publication, or major industry influencer. You can use your blog to share news about your accomplishments, or you can highlight mentions with a social feed on your site. 

• Awards and certifications: If your company has any specific certifications relevant to your consumers or you’ve achieved awards and recognition, make sure to highlight this. Showcase awards and certification badges on your About and Home pages. 

• Reviews and testimonials: Nearly all interested shoppers read reviews when shopping online. You can save them the trouble of looking for opinions elsewhere by displaying reviews, ratings, and testimonials on your website and product pages. 

9. Integrate Live Chat into Your Website

One of the best ways to increase conversion rates rapidly is to give customers a way to reach out to you if they have any questions about your product or service. Not every customer will be immediately convinced to buy something based on your sales copy alone.

Around 46% of customers say they prefer communicating with customers through live chat over email or social media. With a live chat service, you can provide any person on your website with a live person to connect with on-demand. 

Some will want to find out more about your delivery process first or what your returns and refund policy might be. There are plenty of ways you can give customers this information, by creating a contact form, an FAQ page, or implementing a chatbot into your site.  These are essential as well, but live chat serves as an excellent complement to what your website offers, especially as it pertains to the customer service elements of your website. 

10. Make the Purchase or Decision Making Process Simpler

According to Capterra’s online shopping survey, two-thirds of customers want to finish the checkout journey in less than 4 minutes. With that in mind, look for ways to make things simpler and faster for your customers. 

• Offering guest checkout options: Not every customer wants to sign up for an account on your website just because they’re making a purchase. Offering a guest checkout option, or an option to sign in with other website credentials (such as Amazon or Google passwords) can significantly increase conversion rates. 

• Providing multiple payment options: Ensure you’re able to take payments in a range of different ways to appeal to different customer preferences. You might offer credit and debit card options, access to mobile wallets like PayPal, and even buy-now-pay-later options like Klarna for budget-conscious consumers. 

• Save the cart: If customers do leave your website before making a purchase, make it easy for them to come back and complete the transaction later. Saving cart information means your customer doesn’t have to start searching for products again from scratch. Plus, it ensures you can send dynamic and personalized abandoned cart emails to consumers. 

• Remarketing Emails or Ads:  Data shows that it leads to a 10x increase in click-through rate (CTR) and a 50% reduction in cost-per-click (CPC). It’s also been shown to increase brand awareness and drive more sales.

Conversion Rate Optimization:  Turning Visitors Into Leads or Valuable Customers

Conversion marketing is all about understanding the needs of potential customers and leveraging tactics to turn them into paying customers or potential leads Implementing a CRO audit can help your business optimize its website, improve customer experience, and boost conversions

It is important to keep in mind that conversion rate optimization is an ongoing process. There’s always room for improvement. As such, it’s important to monitor your website analytics regularly and make small changes as needed to maximize the potential of your website. With the right strategy in place, you can drive more revenue and grow your business.

The more time and effort you invest into enhancing the customer experience, analyzing data, and optimizing your website, the more revenue you’ll earn.  What’s more, is that many of the tactics we have identified in this article, will as a whole, also help you to improve your relationship with your target audience. This means you’re more likely to benefit from higher levels of brand loyalty and customer retention. 

If you’re struggling with your conversation rate optimization strategy in 2024, one of the best ways to get a head start is to access the support of a specialist. Our conversion rate optimization specialists will analyze your website and provide tailored guidance to help you reach your goals.

Growth marketing consulting that is available on demand to serve as an outside source that can evaluate your overall strategy, as well as specific campaigns and tactics, and give you specific recommendations (as well as work to implement them) to help achieve growth is an asset that few businesses take advantage of.

Conversion rate optimization can be a major driver for growth in your business.  That‘s why you ought to reach out to our growth marketing experts for a free initial consultation.