As we start a new year, Advertisers and Publishers alike are striving to drive incremental growth and strategic scale of their revenue and bottom line. One of the best ways of driving that incremental lift is through strategic conversion optimization.
What does this mean? This means that every dollar you spend on marketing goes a whole lot farther. Why? Because when you invest in conversion optimization, you’re ultimately helping more people buy more easily however using the same, or less budget. This equals a greater ROI and ROAS on marketing campaigns, and far more engaged partners who are driving traffic to your website and landing pages!
This week we interviewed Co-Founder and President of Conversion Fanatics, Justin Christianson, to tell us a little more about what brands should be doing to maximize revenue through conversion rate optimization this year.
The first thing I generally recommend is to look at what their website visitors are telling them. This could be in the form of qualitative or quantitative data such as heat/click maps, visitor flow and analytics. Your data tells a story of how your marketing
If you want to improve your marketing performance you must find out how your visitors interact with your [partner’s] marketing messages and site. You need to find out where they are coming from, where they are going and where they are falling off. Then put your focus on the biggest leveraged areas.
A good example is maybe you find out that visitors are getting to your product detail page but then instead of adding something to the cart they are clicking on the “about us” link in the menu. This would indicate that the visitors don’t trust you [or the referral site] enough to actually make a purchase. You would then look for ways to build trust on the details page and test those elements to see how much weight they truly have when it comes to conversions.
The second way is to make sure you are consistent and congruent throughout the entire visitor journey. This means your ad [or affiliate referral link] should match the landing page and you should continue selling the benefits of your solution until the desire goal is reached.
You need to constantly be evolving as the markets change and the only time tested way to do that is to follow a strategic conversion optimization plan.
Through optimization you will learn more about your visitors’ behaviors which will allow you to better connect with them through your [performance and affiliate] marketing in turn making you more money.
The biggest mistake I see companies make is treating every traffic source the same. There is no one size fits all here.
If you have a mobile responsive site you need to make sure you optimize the user experience on the mobile version of the site and not just the desktop. The browsing habits on desktop are different than that of mobile. More people scroll on mobile vs. desktop thanks to smart phones. Just a flick of the thumb and you are down the page.
When looking at user experience you need to figure out what the visitors are paying attention to, what the important elements are on the page and what they are ignoring. A great way to do this is either through user testing, survey your customers, [partners], and/or leverage heat maps.
What I generally look for when analyzing a site [or partner landing page] is if the value proposition is clear, meaning within 5 seconds, and I can tell what you do, how it will benefit me and what the next step is along with what I will get by taking that next step.
Then I look to make sure there is a clear path along the journey to the end goal that is free from clutter or other distracting elements.
Another example was a company that was selling women’s clothing but had horrible engagement on mobile. What we did was made it simple for visitors to select color, size and quantity by expanding the menu items to remove the need for an additional click, and it increased their mobile conversions by over 39%.
The bottom line is you need to engage your visitors at every step, sell the benefits of your solution and make it simple for them to get to the end goal you want them to achieve on your site.
This is a great question. So many times companies get hung up on the actual conversion rate percentage when they should be focusing on a couple different metrics, average order value or value of the lead and the cost per acquisition.
When you focus on these numbers your conversion rate becomes a relative number.
If you focus solely on the conversion rate and working to improve that you could actually end up making yourself less money.
Once you get a handle on your AOV and your CPA metrics then you can work to incrementally improve your conversion rate at every step.
Some other elements to look out for are bounce rate, which can indicate low engagement. If you are using video look for video engagement numbers. Then from there it is important to look at micro conversion metrics such as clicking on a shop now button or adding a product to cart or maybe it is as simple as selecting a size or color of an item.
With our optimization process at Conversion Fanatics and what we do for our clients, we put the majority of the focus on the big picture as to what the numbers are telling us, then work to improve each step in the visitor flow. We test and measure what elements hold the most weight on the page so that we can set ourselves up to give the visitors more of what they want in turn improving the marketing performance.
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In summary, if you’re an affiliate or advertiser looking to increase your sales and improve your user experience, being cognoscente on conversion optimization will help you drive increases to desired results that will create the lift you are looking for.
Optimize your conversions with these 5 critical steps.
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