Some internet marketing pros put so much time and effort into certain tasks that they overlook other areas that are in desperate need of improvement.
They design ads, launch landing pages, send emails, and resort to any other budget-friendly tactic imaginable that might grab the attention of consumers with disposable income. But many of these diligent marketers seem to think that merely generating web traffic should be enough to get buyers to hand over their credit card numbers. That’s really only half the battle.
There’s a lot that can go wrong between a customer’s initial arrival on your site and that magic moment when they reach for the “Buy Now” button. In most cases, your internet visitor spends a few moments or a few minutes poking around your site before leaving, never to return, without having made a purchase.
So how do you get your visitors to spend their hard-earned money on your business? As usual, the AdBeacon team has some ideas you may wish to consider. First, though, we need to figure out your conversion rate.
Calculating Your Conversion Rate
In the marketing lexicon, a “conversion” can be pretty much any action taken by a customer that advances their journey through the sales funnel: signing up for an email newsletter, visiting a landing page, watching a video on your site for a specified length of time, and so on. But the most important conversion occurs when you make a sale, and that’s what we’ll focus on here.
To get a good sense of how often your visitors are buying from your business, you need to know your conversion rate—that is, the percentage of your web traffic that results in a sale.
There are various ways you can calculate this, based on the type of conversion you want to measure, but for our purposes here we’ll define your conversion rate as the number of site visits compared to the number of purchases completed. This can be expressed as the following formula:
Conversion Rate (%) = Sales / Unique Site Visits x 100
For example, if you get 10,000 unique visitors within a certain time frame, resulting in 150 sales, your conversion rate is 1.5%.
But what does this mean? How do you know if you have a “good” conversion rate? There is no universal answer to that; it varies by industry. A business that specializes in high-end luxury items will naturally have a lower conversion rate than a business that primarily sells common household goods. One source places the average ecommerce conversion rate at 2.1% (as of November 2022).
Whatever your current conversion rate is, you should definitely aim at increasing it. What follows are some suggestions for achieving that goal.
Turning Traffic into Conversions
There are many reasons why consumers leave your site without making a conversion, and there is no simple trick that addresses every conceivable problem. However, there are some reasonably easy fixes that can aid your conversion rate optimization (CRO) efforts. These include:
Create trust – Consumers want to feel they can trust the site they’re on—if they can’t, they’re going to be understandably leery of inputting their credit card data.
It’s a sound practice to display your SSL certificates, your customer testimonials, your privacy policy, and your contact info where these can be easily viewed.
Improve site loading speeds – It’s not 1995 anymore. Nobody has time for websites that take forever to load content. Slow-loading web pages are among the biggest contributors to a high bounce rate (i.e., the proportion of site visitors who leave after viewing only one page).
Ideally, your pages should take no more than three seconds to load. If you’re having trouble reaching this benchmark, consider reducing the number of images and videos on your pages.
Follow up on abandoned carts – The rate of shopping cart abandonment is shockingly high in the ecommerce sector, and it has a multitude of causes, from unexpected shipping charges to needlessly complicated checkout procedures. Fixing those issues is important for upping your conversion rate.
One tactic for reducing the incidence of abandonment is to send a discount code to shoppers who have left behind an item in their virtual cart—often, the lure of a coupon will help customers overcome their resistance to making a purchase.
Target the right customers – Another cause of low conversion rates is an inability to attract relevant audiences for whatever you’re selling. Simply put, if consumers are categorically uninterested in the kinds of goods or services you have on display, that’s usually going to become clear to them within seconds of their arrival on your website.
This is the sort of issue that can often be traced to ineffective or poorly targeted ad campaigns. To maximize your advertising ROI, you need to ensure that you’re reaching the right audience.
That last tip requires you to take a close look at your current ad strategy and figure out its weak points. The AdBeacon digital ad optimization platform provides all the tools you need for this mission.
AdBeacon: Your Customer Journey Tracking Solution
It’s not enough to get a lot of internet traffic—you need the right kind. That means you need to design your ad campaigns so that they’re geared toward the audiences that are most receptive to your brand. The only way to do that with confidence is to gather accurate data about the performance of your campaigns so you can see who is in your various marketing funnel stages.
AdBeacon’s advanced digital marketing tools empower you to do just that—by leveraging the unmatched insights provided by first-party data.
This state-of-the-art ad optimization platform supplies you with a wealth of marketing attribution information, including cost per click (CPC) and revenue per lead data. By expertly analyzing ecommerce data obtained directly from your own customers—not some third-party organization—AdBeacon allows you to maximize your return on ad spend (ROAS), design effectively personalized ads, identify marketing qualified leads (MQLs), and guide your campaigns across all channels.
Actionable insights from AdBeacon can help you turn website visitors into long-term customers. Book your AdBeacon demo today!